


i can't seem to get a grip, no matter how i live with it

by psikeval



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Angst, Emotional Baggage, Families of Choice, Howard Stark's Bad Parenting, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Implied/Referenced Military Suicide, M/M, Self-Doubt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-18
Updated: 2018-08-18
Packaged: 2019-06-29 06:41:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,270
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15724041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/psikeval/pseuds/psikeval
Summary: Tony knows he's got no business being a father.





	i can't seem to get a grip, no matter how i live with it

**Author's Note:**

> many thanks to the lovely [pearwaldorf](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pearwaldorf) for beta-reading at the drop of a hat when i staggered onto twitter yelling about daddy issues.docx -- she is the real mvp of this particular feelings-rodeo.
> 
> On a more serious note: this fic contains a lot of heavy themes, some of which are dealt with explicitly while others are only referenced in passing. Please read the tags and proceed accordingly.

 

It’s Thursday, which is Project Night in the schedule Tony and Peter have fallen into.

Today they're going through archives of pre-digital files, hard-copy backups of anything lost or corrupted, and some things Tony put into boxes just so he wouldn’t have to deal with them. Everything’s getting centralized in the primary data core, and simultaneously copied onto so many clouds that Tony started humming, and then had Friday play, “Stormy Weather.” It’s busywork but it needs to be done, and Tony needs to supervise what’s tossed and what’s kept; this way Peter learns the system and gets some basic programming under his belt.

Peter kneels and puts his last two (unimaginative and redundant) files in the Destroy pile on the floor, which he neatens with quick little motions. Then he reaches out for more, expecting Tony to heave another stack across the gap between them.

And for the record, Tony intends to do just that, but he’s right in the middle of some finicky 3D rendering that’s gotten glitched, so it’s gonna have to wait just a second.

Peter’s hand waves a little more violently. He thinks he hasn’t been noticed. “Hey, Dad, could you hand me the next batch?”

 _Um_.

“Beg pardon?” Tony manages. 

There’s a long beat, in which Peter is stock-still, crouched behind his workstation. Then, slowly, Peter’s head emerges from behind the table, eyes round as arc reactors. “I—um. What?”

“What yourself,” says Tony, quite reasonably. “You’re the one who just called me Dad.”

There’s an awful, cinematic silence as those words sink in for Peter, his eyes getting wider and more horrified by the second. “I didn’t— I, not like— _obviously_ you’re not my—” He sputters to a stop, mouth gaping open like a panicked trout, then blurts out, “if anything, I see you as a bother figure!”

By some miracle, Tony keeps himself from smiling.

“Uh, kid, I don’t know how to tell you this, but being old does not mean I’ve never watched TV in my life. As Captain America himself once said, I understood that reference.”

“When do you have _time_ to watch anything,” Peter asks despairingly, face buried in his hands.

Tony straightens, lifts up his chin and tells a lie. “While pooping.”

(In reality, Tony watches TV with Rhodey a few nights a week, work permitting, and they cuddle; it’s disgusting and he wouldn’t trade it for the world. But Tony has no intention of admitting to it, not when Peter has so obligingly made himself Most Embarrassing Person in the room.)

(Obviously, while pooping, he uses the digital interface that follows him from room to room, because taking breaks is how ideas get lost and Tony’s not a goddamn fool.)

“Eugh. God. Why.”

“Kill your heroes, Spider-boy. Reality is messy.”

“I hate you,” says Peter fervently, snatching up the next blueprint. Tony grins and makes a face at him, but that’s about it; things are already back to normal. They work in companionable silence until Peter checks his watch and groans, because it’s time to go.

Of course, Tony thinks, out on the balcony with Rhodey, as they watch Peter scurry over to the car that’s waiting for him — Tony Stark wouldn’t be himself if he passed up on a parting shot.

“Goodnight, son!” he bellows across the grounds, and when Peter cringes with his whole body Tony’s laughing louder than he has in days or weeks and Rhodey is laughing too, Rhodey is smiling all broad and sure, his eyes full of warmth, knowing in a way that feels like a promise unspoken between them — and then, only then, does Tony realize he’s made a mistake.

Only then, when it’s much too late, but that’s pretty much how it goes, right?

 

\--

 

Right up front: Tony knows he’s got no business being a father.

And it’s not like anyone’s ever really tried to tell him otherwise. For a while there, pretty much his whole thing was having sex with models and selling weapons of mass destruction—which, nothing wrong with models, very nice ladies for the most part, everyone’s gotta make a living, but, well—you put the two together and you kind of see it staring at you. Tony Stark: not parent material. Certainly not then, but also, certainly not ever.

Because honestly, what did his big moral turnaround get him? A lot of guilt, a lot of near-death experiences both with and without weird space aliens, and a work/life imbalance that’s been getting so egregious that “imbalance” doesn’t seem like a good enough word and Tony’s thinking about trading in the forward slash for a hyphen. It’s his work-life. His life’s work.

Back in college, he’d really hoped his life’s work would involve more money and less PTSD.

 

( _Post-traumatic stress disorder_. Rhodey makes him say it properly,  
without joking, at least once per conversation when they talk about shit  
that Tony _never_ wants to talk about, and a few times in the beginning  
Tony tried to make a crappy joke out of it; but then he always had to  
look Rhodey in the face after, Rhodey who knows this shit backwards and  
forwards, who’s lost friends in the army to a hell of a lot more than combat.  
Who first came to Tony years ago, past midnight, half drunk, because  
he’d just gotten the news and he wanted to know _how didn’t I notice? What_  
_could I have done?_ and maybe the answer is ‘nothing’ but not even Tony  
at his worst can pretend it doesn’t matter. So he doesn’t say crazy and he  
doesn’t say stupid and he never, ever jokes about dying. Or wanting to.  
And sometimes, instead of talking at all, he just drags Rhodey into  
his arms and holds on tight and they don’t—he doesn’t let go.)

 

And okay, granted: the fact that Tony can look at the life he has right now and say, with a straight face, “Yeah, always thought I’d be richer”—that probably says something, too. That’s where his priorities used to be, in the pretty damn nearby past. Not financial security, which, typical rich kid, he’s never not had; not a real goal, like the philanthropy and the grants and the clean energy. Just money. More money than his father could’ve ever imagined.

What were the limits of Howard Stark’s imagination? Maybe one more building or another private island. Maybe another digit in a certain private bank account, that does nothing, really, except say ‘I told you so.’ See? Not the priorities of a family man.

None of that’s the reason Tony knows he shouldn’t have kids, but—

—whatever. Those are the reasons nobody fights him on it, the reasons that sometimes, when he says no, there’s a palpable sigh of relief. Something everybody can agree on, right?

  

(What he means is: Tony doesn’t let go. 

But come to think of it, Rhodey doesn’t either.)

 

\--

 

“What’s this?” Rhodey asks, tapping his fingers twice in the air over one specific schematic so it fills the whole display. With a frown, Rhodey twists his wrist absently, making the image turn to show every side, and Tony has to fight down a stupid sense of pride. Rhodey gripes about all the tech in their living room constantly, but never has to ask how something works twice.

Tony glances at the schematic, then goes back to what he’s doing. Sort of. There’s a less than zero chance he’s typing nonsense words at random. “Just a thing for the kid.”

“What kid?”

“Y’know. Spider-kid. Parker.”

“Peter,” Rhodey says, in a particular tone of voice that means his eyebrows are raised and he feels like he’s onto something. Tony, for the record, hates that tone.

“Yeah that’s— basically what I said.” 

“Uh-huh.”

Tony turns on his heels to face Rhodey and narrows his eyes. “I feel mocked.”

“You _are_ mocked,” Rhodey says easily. Shrugs. “So you’ve adopted him, whatever. It’s nice.”

“Ha!” He means to actually laugh, but fumbles it, and instead the sound just punches out of him in that one, spoken syllable, a too-sharp burst of derision. “Yeah, okay. Sure.”

Rhodey gives him an odd, troubled look, but doesn’t say anything.

The silence stretches on, though, and Tony’s never known when to quit. 

“I’m not ‘adopting’ anyone, okay? Just so we’re clear. This is— research, R&D, you might’ve heard of it.” He waves a stylus in the direction of Peter’s new spider-suit, fifth in a line of slowly improving skin-tight synthetic armors tailored to the kid’s weird bug powers. “Advancing our understanding of new technology, so, you’re welcome.”

“Thank you so much, Tony. If I start shooting spider-jizz out of my wrists, this will be incredibly helpful.”

“It’s actually called silk? So there’s no need to be crude, Colonel.”

Rhodey rolls his eyes, half-laughing already. “Shut the fuck up.”

“Hmm. Is this where I say ‘make me’?”

“I know this will come as a shock to you, but it’s actually when you stop talking.”

“See, that just doesn’t feel right. Maybe we—”

There are times when Tony talks just to see how far he can get, but Rhodey is more than familiar by now with the skill of kissing him quiet, muffling the words with lingering presses of his lips until Tony loses track, with Rhodey’s hands on his hips, holding him, grounding.

 

\--

 

They don’t ever talk about Howard, and that’s not on Rhodey. Not on anyone, really. Tony doesn’t know how. If it’s not a quip or a speech or a stunt, he’s got nothing to say. Or maybe there’s so many things to say that they all collect in his throat like bile, thick and burning.

“Not like it matters what I'd say to him. About him. Whatever,” he said once, turning an empty glass in his hand, melting ice and a few drops of bourbon clinking at the bottom. “What with him being dead and all.”

“It’s okay,” said Rhodey, soft enough to spear through Tony’s heart. “You don’t have to know.”

That was in San Jose, four years ago. The night Tony realized that the awful splintered feeling in his chest just might be love, the real deal, forever. _Oh,_ he thought. _Oh shit._

  

(A few of those things would sound like this:

I was afraid of him before I knew what fear was,  
and afraid of his shadow long after he’d gone for good.  
There was never anyone else for me to aim for;  
no matter what, Howard Stark was the one to beat.  
Sometimes I see his picture stuck on magazines and papers  
and I still taste blood in my mouth. I never needed Captain America  
to prove I was a disappointment. I plan to leave my dad behind,  
burn his memory to ash; I’ll forget the sound of his fist  
slamming into the table, the walls, shattered glass. 

When they buried him, I spat on his grave and it made me feel sick.  
I forget about him for weeks at a time.  
I miss him every fucking day.  
I’m glad he’s dead.  
I’m glad.)

  

Now he’s a grown man, and has been for years. In fact, the years without his parents now outnumber the years he spent with them—even if ‘spent’ is generous, what with Howard always running off to the White House, Pentagon, United fucking Nations. Big places, big people, big paychecks, that’s how Stark Industries made their name. Tony’s had plenty of time to accept how things were, and how they are now. What could he possibly need from his father anymore?

A chance to get the last word, or closure, or some kind of petty revenge, finally man to man. With Tony (or at least the Tony he imagines) no longer afraid, not even a little. Wrenching open the closet door and proving the monsters were never real, or just never mattered. Is that childish? Does Tony care? Maybe all he wants is a cut-rate puppet of Howard, one who’d say “I’m proud” or “I’m so sorry” or “I love you.”

That, Tony knows, would be the quickest way to shatter the illusion. 

 _I love you, Dad. And I know you did the best you could_. Fun fact: he’s never kept the scenario running. Always paused it at the same exact second. Because Tony is too good at what he does, and digital Howard would do just as real Howard would have done: laugh, maybe a little suspicious, and ask _“What the hell’s the matter with you?”_

Question for the ages, really.

 

\--

 

“Hey, Mister Stark!”

Tony doesn’t even break stride as he enters the construction suite, because Peter showing up early and in the wrong place is, overall, pretty par for the course. Kid’s got all the skills of a cat burglar, plus Friday on his side. But still. “How many times’ve I gotta tell you no perching on equipment please? Remember what happened with Dum-E and the soldering iron?”

“This one’s sturdy, though.” Peter rocks on his heels atop the Hulk-sized suit, rapping at the helmet with his knuckles. Like a little teenaged parrot on its shoulder.

“Uh-huh. Kid, you’re killing me.”

“Fine, sorry.” With a supremely unbothered shrug, Peter swings down onto the floor, shakes out his arms like he’s getting ready for a fight—or just finished one. “So what are we doing today? I mean, aside from trigonometry, ’cause I could really use some help before my midterm—”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Tony, loudly, to the room at large, which he looks around as if expecting an audience. “Am I an after-school tutoring program now? Friday, help me out here.”

“The number of times you have assisted Mr. Parker with his coursework is approximately—”

“Not what I was going for. Approximately betrayed.”

Friday subsides, but Peter stands there looking as buoyant and hopeful as ever.

“All right, fine, we’ll—see what I remember, I guess, but no promises.” 

The grin on Peter looks like it’ll split his face in two. “You’re the best, Mr. Stark!”

The rest of the evening is Tony, Peter, a badly written textbook, and a bouncy rubber stress ball that gets smacked into every possible surface under the guise of practical demonstration. Angles at work, plus some bonus physics, actually. Nothing but the best for _this_ after-school program.

“Ow,” Tony mutters when the ball ricochets back into his face.

“Hey, I think I almost got it! You should totally do that again.”

“Oh, well then, here, I’ll just—”

“Ow!” Peter yelps, curling up small, before the ball can even brush past his hair. Tony despairs.

“The amount of lunch money you’ve lost in your life, would you put that in the thousands?”

“Excuse me, those are _good reflexes_! That is what’s happening here.”

“Wow I’m sorry, it just looks so much like a tiny baby hiding—”

“Spider-speed! You think you can catch me?”

“Is it spiders who curl up in a ball like that when they’re dead?”

“That is a totally different thing, Mister Stark, I was— _ugh_ , teach me math!”

It’s not until they finish the chapter, and Tony grabs up the book for a dramatic Thor-like reading of the section labeled “APPLY THIS!” that they look up and realize Rhodey is leaned up against the doorway, half in shadow, the points of light along the sides of his leg-braces glowing like tiny lamps in the dark. Tony has no idea how long he’s been there.

He does, however, have a few hypotheses about the too-soft, wondering look on Rhodey’s face.

Rather than go there, he sets down the book and taps Peter’s elbow. “Okay kid, that’s your cue.”

There’s an element of cowardice at play here, for sure. A desire to get while the getting is good. But Tony, who has a well-developed sense of self-preservation, knows when it’s best to cut and run, especially with Rhodey. And to that end, he shoves the last few books into Peter’s hands and claps a hand on his back, scooting him on towards the door and away from here.

As they pass, Rhodey raises his eyebrows with a dangerous curve to his lips. “R&D, huh?” 

“Kiss my ass, Colonel!” Tony says brightly, walking Peter briskly by without a sideways glance, and the kid trips over nothing and has to catch half his textbooks in midair.

 

\--

 

Still, nobody’s getting _adopted_ here.

Rhodey looks all sad when Tony tells him the real reason why not (unprompted, just because he can’t hold it back and can’t have Rhodey thinking he’s—that he doesn’t care about the kid, or whatever. Peter might be a brat, but he’s good. Deserves better.) And it doesn’t make any sense for Rhodey to look that gutted, that frustrated and miserable, over basic common sense.

Tony’s not about to apologize. So they stand there, at a stalemate.

After a while, Tony starts to hit a pen too hard against the counter, steady quickening thwacks that rattle the plastic insides. “What?” he asks sharply. “You’re gonna fight me on this?” 

Rhodey reaches over and catches Tony’s hands in his. “You’re not him.”

It shouldn’t take the air from the room, but it does. A cavernous, echoing emptiness, not at all like the black void of space: a lacuna in the strictest sense. What’s missing here is not a part of nature, like the vacuum that lies between the stars. It was never meant to be gone. But it is.

“Okay, well, great. Good talk. Doesn’t change the facts.”

“You’re wrong.”

“Am I?” Tony’s smile feels jagged, wrong, prickly and warped.

Rhodey stands and circles the counter between them, too close, _too close_ for the skittish scrambling in Tony’s mind. Close enough to touch, then closer still.

“I remember one time you got captured. Thrown in a cave, cut off from the world, half-starved and full of shrapnel.” There’s the slightest tremor in Rhodey’s hands, just saying the words, but he steadies them enough to touch Tony’s neck and slide up, cradle his face, thumbs resting on Tony’s cheeks. Rhodey’s eyes are dark and searching and so very gentle. “They didn’t break you. What makes you think Howard did?”

An answer exists, ready and truthful: _at least they started from the outside in_.

Tony inhales, exhales, and tries not to say it. Tries to think about this rationally, instead of just the knee-jerk _What makes you think he **didn’t** , for Christ’s sake, I of all people would know._

But he doesn’t. He can’t be sure, and that’s the hell of it.

How do you find and uproot something that’s older than yourself? Where’s the map to every blurred line, the itemized list of each inheritance? When can Tony ever lose his temper and know, really _know_ afterwards, that all of it was him and never Howard?

“I don’t know,” he says, to all of it. “Okay? I don’t know.”

“Yeah, well I do.”

“Fine. Enlighten me.” 

Rhodey shrugs, just a little, there and gone. Says it so simply: “I know you’re good.”

The words rip through Tony like gales of wind, of rain, of laughter. Leaves him breathless. If Rhodey ‘knows’, he knows it in the way that men once knew the Earth was flat.

It’s a matter of lacking the proper information.

 

\--

 

Tony thinks about it later. _You’re not him_. It’s nice to hear, but—

  

(But think about genetics, about attachment and conditioning, nature  
and nurture blending into one. There is quite literally part of each  
parent in their biological offspring, even before the Howards of the world  
get a chance to start in on the psychological, the emotional. Who’s to say  
exactly how much of Howard Stark lives on in his son? How much of it is  
stuck too deep to extract? Because even the tiniest piece would be too  
much to inflict on someone else, let alone a kid, whether that kid is  
Tony’s or anyone else’s. It stops here, with him. It has to.)

 

—‘nice’ has never been the same as true.

There are some things you can’t take back. Roles you accept, in someone else’s life, that don’t come with a receipt. And Tony has always known that no matter how much he craves intimacy in the hollowed-out theoretical, or how many times he tries to gather up the people he loves into one place, one group, one—

 

(Family. The others say it so easily, or at least that’s how  
it feels. No matter the shape it takes, they know the taste of the  
word, the outline of its bones. They know what it means to _them_ ,  
and was there a course on that somewhere that Tony missed? Because  
some things feel so alien, not meant for him, that he wonders if it’s best  
to let it go. If some colors only show themselves to certain eyes.) 

 

Anyway. Tony always does it with one foot out the door, ready for the first to leave, refuse, get sick of it, or sick of his ego, decide he’s not the man they thought he was. And he knows, he fucking knows that’s not the way to build something real. Something that lasts. But you don’t spend years making metal suits of armor if you’re only a normal amount afraid of getting hurt, and historically, it’s been easier for Tony to survive with escape plans always at the ready.

So it’s an impasse. Trying and mostly failing to make the good things stick, while the people who don’t go remain this bizarre and mysterious phenomenon, one he shouldn’t examine too closely. Like they say, gift horses, mouths, sharp teeth and jaws clamped shut around soft flesh when you least expect it—

You know how the saying goes.

 

\--

 

“So, what. You think I should just—go the full Barton, start a family in the woods?” 

Even staring at the back of his head, Tony knows that Rhodey is rolling his eyes, but when he swivels his armchair to look at Tony, all he does is shrug, considering. “I could see you as a farmer.” 

“Okay, seriously though. For one second. How do you think that whole thing would play out?”

Rhodey takes a deep, slow breath. “Can I say something you’re not gonna like?”

“Sure, go for it. Why the hell not.”

“You talk about all this like it’s a story. Like somewhere down the line you turn a page and find out, oh, Tony Stark, he did all right—or oh, shit, that was a mistake.” Rhodey huffs out a small, helpless, humorless laugh and then looks back at Tony, the sprawl of his whole body like a second shrug writ large. “You know how I think it plays out? Same way I see it going now. Tony Stark gets out of bed every day and tries his best to be a better person. Not just better than Howard, but better than you were five years ago, better than you were yesterday. Maybe you take in the kid, and maybe you don’t. That’s up to you. But you don’t get to pretend that you somehow weren’t ‘made’ for a family. Not when your whole damn life, you’ve made yourself.”

Tony wishes he wasn’t standing. He wishes there was something he could do with his hands, which feel numb and shaky and cold like the rest of his body. Because here’s another not-so-secret thing: he’s never been equipped to be loved the way Rhodey loves him, seen the way Rhodey sees him. He doesn’t know how to be _believed in_ this much.

He half-turns towards the bar, but doesn’t know if he’s steady enough to walk there. Drops down on the couch instead, slumped, staring down at his hands like they are freshly molded, new.

“I’m scared. Okay? I’m scared.”

“You think I don’t know that?” Rhodey says gently, with the worst, most understanding sad little smile on his face. “Tony, you can’t lie for shit.”

“Objection.”

“Not to me, you can’t.”

Tony didn’t intend this, stupid as it sounds. He didn’t mean to sign himself up for real intimacy, fucking _emotional vulnerability_ , just because he fell in love. There are days he’d like a refund. He wipes at his eyes and kind of wishes this was one of them. “I could, for the record.”

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. It just kind of… lost its appeal, I guess.”

“Either way. I’m glad.” Rhodey moves all quiet and slow, sinking down next to Tony like there’s a detonator somewhere, which— Tony never wanted that either, to continue the line of Starks people have to tiptoe around. Who might ignite at even the hint of a spark.

Rhodey’s hand, running steady through his hair, settling against his skull. Fingertips easing back and forth along Tony’s scalp until he breathes. “Hey. No.”

So Tony tries his damnedest to be still, to keep breathing. And he exists, with someone in his space, in his life, close enough to blur the lines, and it’s—yeah, still scary as hell. But Tony is starting to wonder if maybe it’s a fear he can face, day by day, just a little at a time. If maybe there’s more than one way to be more than his father ever dreamed. “Okay.”

He’s not expecting it—not really—but he isn’t surprised, either, when Rhodey gets out his phone and dials. (Dials numbers, with his thumb, like they’re living in the stone age.)

“Hey, Peter, it’s James,” he says, light even as Tony huddles in closer against his chest. “Yeah, also a Colonel, if you’re planning to enlist.” A low, breathy laugh. “Trust me, it’s okay. Me and Tony were wondering if you wanna come for dinner.”

 

 


End file.
